For cancer patients, radiation therapy is recognized as a valuable form of treatment. Radiation therapy involves the transmission of radiation energy to a tumor site within the patient.
Radiation therapy planning may be carried out according to a forward planning technique or an inverse planning technique. Forward planning involves delivering an initial planned radiation dose and then delivering subsequent doses by observation or inference of the efficacy of the preceding dose in a trial-and-error manner. The optimization of dose delivery by forward planning is therefore performed according to human observation and experience. Inverse planning instead seeks to calculate an optimized dose delivery and then work backwards to determine the appropriate radiation beam characteristics to deliver that optimized dose.
Inverse planning of radiation therapy for tumors may be performed for Tomotherapy or Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) radiation delivery techniques. Both of these techniques involve transmission of radiation beams, usually collimated by a multi-leaf collimator (MLC), toward the tumor site from various angular orientations. For Tomotherapy, a helical arc is employed to irradiate the tumor slice by slice, while for IMRT multiple intensity-modulated conical beams are used to irradiate the tumor from a number of different directions.
In order to ensure that the patient is optimally treated, it is necessary to ensure that the radiation dose is deposited primarily within the tumor volume, rather than in the surrounding tissue or organs. It has been found to be problematic to quickly and reliably determine an optimization so as to maximize the dose delivery to the tumor site while minimizing radiation dose delivery to other organs or tissues.
A fast optimization algorithm is important, not only for designing good radiation treatment plans, but also for the successful implementation of future interactive adaptive treatment techniques. Conventional optimization algorithms using numerical searches, such as the known conjugate gradient search with positive beam weight constraints, usually require many iterations involving long computation times and may result in sub-optimal plans due to trapping in local minima of the objective function.
It is possible to determine a direct solution of the inverse problem using conventional quadratic objective functions, without imposing positive beam weight constraints. This solution is computationally faster but results in unrealistic (negative) beam intensities. Once an ad-hoc condition requiring the beam intensities to be positive is introduced (i.e., by forcing negative intensity values to be zero), the solution of the quadratic objective function by linear algebraic equations yields a radiation therapy dose distribution with significant artifacts. These artifacts may significantly deteriorate an otherwise optimized dose delivery. Accordingly, rather than treat a patient with a sub-optimal dose delivery, the rather more computationally intensive numerical searching has been preferred for finding the minimum of the objective function.
A further drawback of current IMRT plan optimization, is that only about seven to eleven different gantry angles may be employed because present techniques find it too computationally intensive to optimize the objective function for a greater number of beams.
In view of the above shortcomings of existing systems, it is desired to provide a method and system for optimized dose delivery, which addresses or ameliorates one or more of the mentioned shortcomings.